The inertial technology is one of core technologies for a national defense weapon equipment system, which plays a very important role in improving rapid mobility of troops, conducting precision strikes and improving self-viability. In the field of inertial navigation, a gyroscope is used to measure an inertial angular velocity generally. A high-precision gyroscope directly affects navigation precision of an inertial navigation system, thus, a precision level of the gyroscope is a measure of national military technology levels.
Currently, practical high-precision gyroscopes mainly include electrostatic gyroscope and threefold floated gyroscope. The electrostatic gyroscope is the most accurate gyroscope so far, but it has a large size, its key component requires very high dimension accuracy, thus the processing is difficult, and costs are also very high. The threefold floated gyroscope is a mechanical gyroscope with stability of drift second only to the electrostatic gyroscope, however, high processing precision, strict assembly and precise temperature control are also required, and thus its costs are also very high.
High-precision gyroscopes which are being explored in theory include cold atom gyroscope, nuclear magnetic resonance gyroscope and slow light gyroscope. The cold atom gyroscope is implemented based on a cold atom interferometer, which has great potential sensitivity, but is difficult to be implemented. Precision of the nuclear magnetic resonance gyroscope with a cryogenic superconductor may surpass that of the electrostatic gyroscope theoretically, however, the sophistication of currently developed prototypes is far less than the level of the electrostatic gyroscope, which also brings high processing difficulty and production costs. As for the slow light gyroscope, there hasn't been a successful theory verification example yet.
An optical gyroscope has features such as compact structure and high sensitivity, which commands the greatest market share of the high-precision gyroscope, it operates on the theory of detecting an angular velocity based on the Sagnac effect. However, it is difficult to improve precision of a laser gyroscope and an optical fiber gyroscope due to their own limitations such as reciprocity error and drift error of the system, which thus relegate it to the field of medium-precision and low-precision gyroscopes and it is difficult to meet the requirements of high-precision inertial navigation.